….. Surveillance companies like SS8 in the U.S., Hacking Team in Italy and Vupen in France manufacture viruses (Trojans) that hijack individual computers and phones (including iPhones, Blackberries and Androids), take over the device, record its every use, movement, and even the sights and sounds of the room it is in. Other companies like Phoenexia in the Czech Republic collaborate with the military to create speech analysis tools. They identify individuals by gender, age and stress levels and track them based on ‘voiceprints’. Blue Coat in the U.S. and Ipoque in Germany sell tools to governments in countries like China and Iran to prevent dissidents from organizing online. …

At the federal level, the primary source of campaign funds is individuals …

A consequence of the limitation upon personal contributions from any one individual ($2400 for each election, with a total of $4800 for a primary and general election as of 2009[citation needed]) is that campaigns seek out “bundlers,” people who can gather contributions from many individuals in an organization or community, and present the sum to the campaign. Campaigns often recognize these bundlers with honorary titles and, in some cases, exclusive events featuring the candidate.

Bundling has always existed in various forms, but has become more important with the enactment of limits on contributions at the federal level and in most states in the 1970s.[10] EMILY’s List, for example, was involved in early bundling-like activities. Bundlers grew in importance again after the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 prohibited soft money contributions to political parties ….

… In September we reported in this space on a Romney fundraiser at the firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, organized by pro-Israel NORPAC, where at least 30 people paid $5,000 to host the event with the candidate and others coughed up $1,000 to meet him; he took in about $200,000, according to Dr. Ben Chouake, one of the organizers. This time Romney hopes for about half that sum, Gestetner said.

There was also a recent Romney fundraiser in Lawrence, L.I., as well as Manhattan events for Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Utah governor John Huntsman Jr., showing that Orthodox Jews are literally banking heavily on the race to unseat Barack Obama.

Expect a visit soon by surging candidate Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, now that Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind has been hinting at an endorsement. …

…. Fox News Channel has been a key outlet pushing the Jewish neoconservative agenda that lies behind the Iraq War and which animates both the administration of George W. Bush and the “new conservatism” that embraces aggressive Zionism and multiracialism.

Murdoch is nominally a Gentile, but there is some uncertainty about his ancestry and he has vigorously supported Zionism and other Jewish causes throughout his life. (Historian David Irving has published information from a claimed high-level media source who says that Murdoch’s mother, Elisabeth Joy Greene, was Jewish, but we have not been able to confirm this.) Murdoch’s number two executive is Peter Chernin, who is president and chief operating officer—and a Jew. ….

… Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, one of the wealthiest men in the world and a major donor to Jewish and conservative causes, is widely known as a Netanyahu stalwart. Less well known are his equally close ties to Gingrich, to whom he has been a major giver in recent years. …

….. Sand questions whether the Jewish People ever existed as a national group with a common origin in the Land of Israel/Palestine. He concludes that the Jews should be seen as a religious community comprising a mishmash of individuals and groups that had converted to the ancient monotheistic religion but do not have any historical right to establish an independent Jewish state in the Holy Land. In short, the Jewish People, according to Sand, are not really a “people” in the sense of having a common ethnic origin and national heritage. They certainly do not have a political claim over the territory that today constitutes Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem.

An intellectual committed to the secular and liberal traditions of the West, Sand criticizes the Zionist historians and ideologues — he suggests that Zionist historians are ideologues — who introduced a mythical conception of the Jewish People as an ancient race. He charges them with racist thinking. “Today, if anyone dares to suggest that those who are considered Jews in the world … have never constituted and still do not constitute a people or a nation — he is immediately condemned as a hater of Israel,” Sand writes. He contrasts the Zionist dogma that legitimizes the classification of Israeli Jews as members of the Jewish “religion” and “nation” in the government’s identity cards with “civic” or “contractual” nationalism. This latter concept, developed by Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke, defines the nation as an association of people with equal and shared political rights and allegiance to similar political procedures. This sort of civic nationalism excludes religious, racial and even ethnic origins from the definition of the collective identity of Americans or, for that matter, the French and other Western societies. It is celebrated by liberal American-Jews (and non-Jews) like the one I met in Athens in 2000. They recognize that any attempt to impose a more exclusive definition on American identity that reflects the white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant origin of the founders would result in the political and cultural marginalization of American Jews.

But, as Sand demonstrates in his study, the ideology of Zionism is exclusivist — having more in common with the kind of “organic” (or romantic) nationalism under which the collective identity of the nation is based on a mix of language, race, culture, religion and customs of the “people.” It excludes those who do not share them. An ideology of organic nationalism, reflected in the work of German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, had an enormous influence on the nationalist movements of Eastern and Central Europe as well as the Balkans. Zionism was clearly a product of that kind of organic nationalism, a popular intellectual trend in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, where Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, was trying to “invent,” or more likely to reinvent, the Jewish People and create a national mythology. According to this story line, Sand writes, the people “who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland.”

Is the development of that specific national mythology very different from those embraced by other national movements in Europe (and later in the Third World)? They fantasized about a lost Golden Age through which they could invent a grand historical narrative to help mobilize their people to action against the “other” — foreign occupiers and enemies — and provide political legitimacy for the establishment of a separate nation-state. In truth, contemporary Greeks and Germans are no more the descendants of, respectively, the ancient Greeks or the Teutonic tribes than Israeli Jews are the offspring of the Biblical Hebrews.

As a materialist who attaches more importance to the role of “real” political and economic factors in shaping history — as opposed to the ideologies that they produce and that leaders use as instruments to advance their interests — I am a bit skeptical about the power of ideologies or national myths to transform reality. Therefore, I find Sand’s preoccupation with the topic less than useful and some of his historical research less than convincing. He does not really prove that the Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of the population of the kingdom of Khazaria, who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. And his dismissal of new genetic studies that try to trace the ethnic origins of contemporary Jews (and other peoples) is not persuasive. …..